Kanji Conversion

I recently saw a website that will convert any Japanese site into romaji, and I was wondering if there is anything similar to this that will convert it to kana instead. Not that this really makes much of a difference, but romaji can be a bit inaccurate sometimes.

 

Wadoku.de
Its a german page, but it'll tell you the kana for any kanji-word and for seperate kanji.

 

They are most likely using the perl mod of Kakasi. AFAIK it's Kanji to Kana, but you could easily romajify the kana.

 

http://www.hiragana.jp/en/ works pretty well for the purpose.

If you want to read Japanese sites regularly I recommend the rikaichan plugin for Firefox which will display readings and translations according to the installed dictionaries on-the-fly. It's a lot better than the online service Rikai that it's based on.

 

I would highly recommend none of the above if you're serious about learning the language.

 

They are good tools. Just use them wisely.

It's nice to be able to read newspaper articles and understand 100% of the words. While it might not be recommended if you want to improve your reading it's a good way to expand your vocabulary.

 

I've found through countless hours of both methods, the easier it is too look up a word, the easier it is to forget. Having them spoon fed to me pretty much insures I will be looking it up again.

 

JWpce is also pretty good IMO.

http://www.csulb.edu/~mdouglas/jwpce.htm

It'll show up meaning, on & kun-readings of almost any kanji out there. Although there are some problems with rather uncommon Kanjis such as for DoDonPachi (i was never able to find those in that program).

 

Agreed.

However, Furigana.jp will take pasted text blocks or re-draw websites with hiragana in parenthesis after each kanji or kanji group to help you learn the pronunciation.

 

Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten for the DS

of course it wont convert a website but its still cool

 

Yes, but whenever I turn the DS on to look up a Kanji or practice writing I end up playing Manhole... Argh!